Kevin Sun

Sonny Meets Hawk!  (1963) was too far from my expectations for me to appreciate it when I first checked it out a couple years ago. I picked up the record to hear Sonny, rather than Coleman Hawkins, but the Sonny on this record doesn't play the elegant, more easily vocabularized lines found on  Saxophone Colossus  (1956) or Way Out West  (1957). Pat Metheny, in Ben Ratliff's excellent The Jazz Ear , has an interesting take on Sonny's playing on this record: "He was a young guy at the time," Metheny marveled, listening to Rollins's emphatic, darting lines in "All the Things You Are," harmonically at odds with Hawkins's, on the opening chorus. "That feeling is such a great feeling—like 'I can play anything , and it's all good.' Not to analyze it, but Hawk was kind of like his father. And it's like Sonny's saying, 'yeah, but ...'" I'd also add that Sonny's playing on this record is as far from 'acad...

A few days ago, the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine, distributed its semesterly parody issue of the Harvard Crimson. Ordinarily, these parodies aren't of too much interest to myself other than being a mystifying attempt at satire, but I had to post this particular story: Pretty weird, huh? That seems to pretty much be the Lampoon's M.O., but this particular story came to my attention right when I finished Ben Ratliff's The Jazz Ear  (2008), collection of narrative interviews conducted between December 2004 and March 2007, which fittingly features its own set of some of the biggest names in jazz: Wayne Shorter (after I mentioned that my page views spiked from my last post, a friend joked that I should put "Fuck Wayne Shorter Alex Hoffman" at the beginning of every post, so here's that), Pat Metheny, Sonny Rollins, Andrew Hill, Ornette Coleman, Maria Schneider...